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Enfleshed Counter-Memory reckons with shared stories of trauma from the approach of Christian social ethics. Recognizing both deeply personal tragedies and the massive, systemic, global traumas that intertwine them, Edwards writes that “this communal, visceral trauma…ripples through our corporate body again and again,” creating a body that cries out for healing amidst the scabs, scars, and sears on our changed flesh. Yet a practical vision of and for the environments, communities, religious structures, and social spaces in which persons live is most often missing from clinical responses to trauma and ethical inquiries into clinical trauma treatments. Instead of a systematic, constructive, or pastoral theology of trauma, then, Enfleshed Counter-Memory offers a powerful Christian social ethic that advocates emergent, creative forms of healing as the necessary Gospel response to our shared pain.
Stephanie C. Edwards is the Executive Director of the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium (BTI). She holds a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College (2019), where her interdisciplinary research focused on the ties between Christian theology and trauma, particularly in the case of pharmaceutical memory modification for PTSD. Her research can be found in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and Political Theology. Stephanie’s interest in such work has its roots in her “other” career as a social worker (MTS/MSW, Boston University 2011), wherein she has practiced for over a decade.
